Both Secretary of State Clinton and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta have now gone public with concerns over Israel’s growing isolation in the Middle East and are urging that regime to take diplomatic steps to address the issue.
Israeli Government ministers reacted to Clinton’s criticism of democracy Israeli style on Sunday at a weekly cabinet meeting.

In 2006, Israel’s Nuclear Whistleblower, Mordechai Vanunu explained why “Israel is only a democracy if you are a Jew.”

Both Secretary of State Clinton and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta have now gone public with concerns over Israel’s growing isolation in the Middle East and are urging that regime to take diplomatic steps to address the issue.
During a closed forum in Washington on Saturday, “Clinton criticized recent legislative attempts in Israel to restrict left-wing organizations and expressed shock over growing discrimination against Israeli women. She mentioned cases of IDF soldiers leaving during performances of female singers and the fact that females sit in the back of buses in certain places in Israel. Clinton said that some of these phenomena reminded her of Iran.” [1]

On Sunday at a weekly cabinet meeting, Israeli Government ministers reacted to Clinton’s criticism of democracy Israeli style.

Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz claimed Clinton’s comments were “completely exaggerated” and “Israeli democracy is alive, liberal and breathing. I don’t know many better democracies in the world. It is of course necessary to fix things sometimes. The matter of excluding and segregating women is completely unacceptable and needs to be put to a stop, but there is a great distance between this and the argument that there is a threat to Israeli democracy.” [Ibid]

Interior Minister Eli Yishai said that the Knesset passes laws after thorough checks and “Israel is the only democratic country in the Middle East. I assume that everything done here will be done within the law and I am not concerned by that.” [Ibid]

“Everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’ and it was ‘illegal’ to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.”-Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
On 28 May 1993, Ariel Sharon explained:
“The terms ‘democracy’ or ‘democratic’ are totally absent from the Declaration of Independence. This is not an accident. The intention of Zionism was not to bring democracy, needless to say. It was solely motivated by the creation in Eretz-Isrel of a Jewish state belonging to all the Jewish people and to the Jewish people alone. This is why any Jew of the Diaspora has the right to immigrate to Israel and to become a citizen of Israel.”

Israel is an ETHNOCRACY and “An ethnocracy is the opposite of a democracy, although it might incorporate some elements of democracy such as universal citizenship and elections. It arises when one particular group-the Jews in Israel, the Russians in Russia, the Protestants in pre-1972 Northern Ireland, the whites in apartheid South Africa, the Shi’ite Muslims in Iran, the Malay in Malaysia and, if they had their way, the white Christian fundamentalists in the US-seize control of the government and armed forces in order to enforce a regime of exclusive privilege over other groups in what is in fact a multi-ethnic or multi-religious society. Ethnocracy, or ethno-nationalism, privileges ethnos over demos, whereby one’s ethnic affiliation, be it defined by race, descent, religion, language or national origin, takes precedence over citizenship in determining to whom a county actually ‘belongs.’” [2]

Recently Netanyahu’s Likud faction and the Yisrael Beiteinu party of foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, proposed a new law that would censor the human rights community in Israel.

The bill divides non-governmental organizations (NGOs) into two kinds: those defined by the right as pro-Israel and those seen as “political”, or anti-Israel.
“The “political” ones – meaning those that criticize government policies, especially relating to the occupation – will be banned from receiving funds from foreign governments, their main source of income. Donations from private sources, whether Israeli or foreign, will be subject to a crippling 45 per cent tax. The grounds for being defined as a ‘political’ NGO are suitably vague: denying Israel’s right to exist or its Jewish and democratic character; inciting racism; supporting violence against Israel; supporting politicians or soldiers being put on trial in international courts; or backing boycotts of the state.

“One human rights group warned that all groups assisting the UN’s 2009 report by Judge Richard Goldstone into war crimes committed during Israel’s attack on Gaza in winter 2008 would be vulnerable to such a law. Other organizations like Breaking the Silence, which publishes the testimonies of Israeli soldiers who have committed or witnessed war crimes, will be silenced themselves. And an Israeli Arab NGO said it feared that its work demanding equality for all Israeli citizens, including the fifth who are Palestinian, and an end to Jewish privilege would count as denying Israel’s Jewish character.” [3]

Justice minister, Yaacov Neeman, has backed a bill “designed to skew the make-up of a panel-selecting judges for Israel’s supreme court. Several judicial posts are about to fall vacant, and the government hopes to stuff the court with appointees who share its ideological worldview and will not rescind its anti-democratic legislation, including its latest attack on the human rights community. Neeman’s favored candidate is a settler who has a history of ruling against human rights organizations.” [Ibid]

Other non-democratic measures include increasing government intimidation of the Israeli media and academia, a crackdown on whistleblowers and critics of the settlements and how Israel changes the rules to justify injustice.
In this 2006 interview with Vanunu he explains why “Israel is only a democracy if you are a Jew”

On November 24th, the Israeli Government responded to Vanunu’s May 2011 appeal seeking to revoke his citizenship under their new Citizenship Revocation Law, which was targeted to rid Israel of Arab-Israelis [indigenous Palestinians who did not flee the land -and their descendents- and received Israeli citizenship] who had been convicted of treason.

In 2011, the Israeli government refuses to revoke Vanunu’s citizenship under their new law because his “case is old”